If you’re ever walking around East Van and see this in a window, we’re inside.
My queerness
I identify as a genderfluid queer person, and I use they/any pronouns.
Let me break that down, one piece at a time, for clarity’s sake:
| genderfluid | My gender identity and expression shift with context. Most of the time, I feel agender, in neutral settings like work meetings. Sometimes, I feel more feminine, and others, I feel more masculine, which is in line with my assigned sex and others’ perceptions. |
| queer | I like the looseness and inclusiveness of the word queer. It doesn’t prescribe an identity, or limit your sexual or emotional lives. But it isn’t straight; and neither am I. Usually, I am attracted to masculine-bodied people, but by no means exclusively. The body and heart and mind go where they go. |
| person | I am genderfluid. Most of the time, gender is a mindset, and I feel most at home as an agender creature navigating the world with love and magic—a person. I am an enby, a nonbinary human. I was assigned to the male sex at birth and have male features, but that does not define me. I am slowly working through the complex process of switching to the X gender identifier on my documents, and embracing more fluidity. |
| they/any | Given my genderfluidity, I really appreciate being referred to as they/them. Using they/them pronouns is an act of shared love and revolution. I also welcome people to use any pronouns they want or feel suit me in the moment, as I do not seek to live with frustration about pronouns despite their importance to my and others’ identities. I do my best to respect others’ pronouns with solidarity and love. |
My communities
- 2010-2014: Harvard anxious d-hallflowers
- 2014-2018: Toronto workaday gays
- 2018-2020: Oakland queer free spirits
- 2020-now: Vancouver radical queer activists
From 2014 to 2018, I co-led Bain’s BGLAD chapter in Toronto. When me and my pal Chris Chan started in 2014, we were the only ones out in our office. Soon, we built a recruiting dynamo and more than tripled the size of BGLAD Toronto. We were keynote speakers at the 2016 biennial BGLAD Summit in Chicago, sharing our strategy across Bain.
When I started at Rivian in 2020, we had a Slack channel for queer employees and that was it. I collaborated with a group of amazing co-workers to build the LGBTQ2IA+ focused Rainbow Rivianites, one of our first Belonging Resource Groups, which is now a fully-fledged and rapidly growing grassroots organization serving our growing team.
In 2021, I was the Vice Chair of Vancouver’s 2SLGBTQ+ Advisory Committee, with a radical queer perspective that centred Indigenous context, oppressed communities, climate truth, and queer futurism. I left the committee due to the way it served as an empty stamp of approval for a bureaucracy that does not meaningfully engage the queer community as it makes its decisions, and to have more freedom to pursue my own interests and initiatives and manage my workload.
Your queerness
I developed a rich list of questions on identities with my Rainbow Rivianites colleagues. In the end, we didn’t use them; I am publishing an adapted version of the questions below as a fun bit of anonymous research. I hope you find them thought-provoking!
They are in an anonymous Google Form; you can access by visiting https://forms.gle/JLkvWfF5qLNH7SGD8
I will embed some charts here in this page if people fill out the above!